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​BLOG BY GRACE C. YOUNG ﻿﻿

Kids are so fun. Today I talked with about 40 pre-kindergarten students (as young as 3 years old!) at the Tobin School about the ocean and living underwater. They were excited about everything, from Mission 31 to the fact that my necklace had a whale on it. Unlike the kindergarten through third grade students I talked with in the fall, pre-schoolers are a bit too young to understand the full concept of a question. They did, however, tell me tons of stories. One girl even told me she wanted to come on Mission 31 and be a SCUBA diver when she grows up. This made me happy!

I got a lot of "what if" questions, but mostly they told me stories about the water or swimming pools. I love their imaginations. They asked:

What would happen if you met a shark and made it angry?

How do you get food? How do you get drinks?

What if a shark ate your food?

What if a shark visited you?

How big is the house? Is it bigger than a T-rex?

If it was Easter underwater, would all the eggs float?

And told me stories, such as:

"I saw a pink fish once. It had eyes but it couldn't talk."

"I have a swimming pool." (. . . and then everyone talked about swimming pools.)

"I went to the ocean once with my mom." (. . . and then stories about going to the ocean.)

"I have a SCUBA diver bath toy."

Cats SCUBA diving? One student asked if there would be cats underwater. I have no idea why they asked, and I answered no, we wouldn't have cats, but I thought of this video (left) of a SCUBA diving cat. It's hilarious. (Yes, someone put their cat in a tiny SCUBA suit. And it worked!)

Preschool compliment! I also received what's potentially the hugest complement you can get from a preschooler. One girl told me I looked like Elsa (a Disney princess, at right). She even asked if I was wearing Elsa's shoes. I was flattered.

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Author

Grace Young is an MIT ocean engineer, aquanaut, and scientist/engineer with Cousteau's Mission 31. She's currently a PhD student at University of Oxford, chief scientist for the Pisces VI deepsea submarine, and a National Geographic Emerging Explorer.